Hello everyone!

This is going to be a DevLog about the implementation of one particular feature for my game Open Hexagon: online leaderboards.

open hexagon

First of all, what is Open Hexagon?

It’s a fast-paced arcade and rhythm game heavily inspired by Super Hexagon, created with its author’s permission (Terry Cavanagh). You control a small triangle spinning around the center of the screen, and your goal is to avoid various obstacles that hone in towards the center.

Open Hexagon started as a clone of Super Hexagon, but it evolved into much more: it features new mechanics such as a 180° swap and curving walls, and – most importantly – it was completely designed with modding and customization in mind.

Users can create custom levels using Lua scripts and publish them to the Steam Workshop. Fans have created mind-blowing levels that push the engine to its boundaries.

Here’s a short compilation of some very creative user-made levels:

I’ve also had players thank me for getting them into the world of programming, which feels amazing.

Despite being published on Steam, the game is also fully open-source (on GitHub), and anyone can contribute to it or build it themselves for free. My intention is to have the source always freely available so that people can learn from it and/or improve the game.

goals

Now, onto the online leaderboards. The main goals for this feature are:

• After playing a level, the user’s final score is automatically submitted to a server.

• While selecting levels, the user can see his ranking in a global leaderboard.

Stretch goals:

• Download replays of top scores directly in-game from the server, and view them in-game.

issues

Sounds simple enough… but it isn’t. Fortunately, I’ve worked hard to make the game logic fully deterministic and have implemented an input-based replay system already, but there absolutely are zero online capabilities in the game.

Also, I want to make cheating as hard as possible. It sucks when players work hard for high scores, just to have the leaderboard ruined by a hacker.

Therefore, I came up with the following list of things to consider:

• Need a database, somewhere, maybe my VPS or have to rent cloud servers.
  • Not a big deal, but costs and logistics are something to consider.
• Need to completely separate game logic and rendering logic.
  • Definitely a big deal. I started working on this game almost a decade ago, and the codebase is not in a great state, despite my continuous efforts to improve it and clean it up.
• Need headless version of Open Hexagon which only runs game logic without rendering.
  • Again, big deal. The code for the game logic is intertwined with some rendering code.
• Need to somehow encrypt/decrypt replay files to avoid tampering.
  • I have no prior experience in this, but libsodium’s Key Exchange and Steamworks Authentication should help.
• Need Open Hexagon client to produce and send replay clients to the server.
  • What happens if the replay fails to be sent? When to retry?
  • What happens if a client spams the server with replays? How to prevent DDOS attacks?
• Need Open Hexagon server to listen for replay files, and run them to verify validity.
  • What happens on version mismatch between client and server?
  • What about malicious replays? Someone could create a basic custom level without obstacles, run for 10 hours, then send a 10 hour replay that will stop the server from processing legit replays.
  • Need to visually notify the client that (1) replay was received and (2) is being processed.
• Need to improve menu rendering to show leaderboards.
  • Must avoid frequent calls to the server caused by browsing through menu entries.
• What happens if a custom level author updates a level?
  • If it’s just a “refactoring” change that doesn’t affect the behavior of the level, the leaderboard should remain valid
  • Otherwise, existing replays will fail to work. How to detect it? Periodically re-run replays? Or do not detect it at all?
• How to attach player identity to a leaderboard?
  • Custom login system backed up by custom database? Would be a lot of work.
  • Use Steamworks API? Probably easier, but completely ties the game to the Steam platform.

Happy to hear your thoughts on any of the points above.

first milestone

My first milestone will be to implement a flag in the game in order to run it in headless mode, accepting a replay file as input, running it, and printing out information about the replayed playthrough.

Ideally, I should be able to invoke Open Hexagon from the command line like this:

./SSVOpenHexagon.exe -headless <path_to_replay>

And get some sort of output like this:

Replay <path_to_replay> completed.

Level: <level>
Player: <name>
Final time: <time>

I will keep this DevLog updated as a way of motivating myself, documenting my progress, and getting feedback. Hope you enjoy!